John Kerry’s Case For Bombing Syria

Two memorable images dominate perceptions of John Kerry. The first of them, taken from the Fulbright hearings, in April, 1971, shows a lanky twenty-seven-year-old Navy veteran, hair below his ears, medals pinned to his military fatigues, testifying to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about alleged war crimes and atrocities carried out by his fellow soldiers in Southeast Asia. The second image, less flattering to Kerry, emerged during his abortive 2004 Presidential campaign, and it showed him windsurfing off Nantucket. Now, there is a third image: a somber, gray-haired Secretary of State standing behind a podium and talking about rows of Syrian children “lying side by side, sprawled on a hospital floor, all of them dead from Assad’s gas and surrounded by parents and grandparents who had suffered the same fate.”

Kerry’s task was to present to the public the case for bombing Syria. He did it without apology and with some passion, combining specific details about the August 21st attack in Ghouta, an area east of Damascus, with sweeping claims about the nature of the Syrian regime:

The United States government now knows that at least one thousand, four hundred and twenty-nine Syrians were killed in this attack, including at least four hundred and twenty-six children. Even the first responders—the doctors, nurses, and medics who tried to save them—they became victims themselves. We saw them gasping for air, terrified that their own lives were in danger. This is the indiscriminate, inconceivable horror of chemical weapons. This is what Assad did to his own people.

As Kerry spoke, the White House released a four-page intelligence assessment that said the U.S. government had “high confidence that the Syrian government carried out the attack” with some sort of nerve agent. In support of this assessment, the document cited several types of evidence, including intercepted communications between senior Syrian officials that, it said, showed the officials knew about the attacks and worried that evidence of them might be discovered by United Nations inspectors.

Inevitably, there will be comparisons with Colin Powell’s infamous 2003 presentation to the United Nations about Saddam Hussein’s chemical-weapons program, which turned out to be largely bogus. Until Kerry’s claims are subjected to further inspection, it is probably wise to avoid reaching any definitive conclusions. But Kerry himself obliquely referred to the Powell fiasco, saying that the intelligence community had “reviewed and re-reviewed” the evidence about the attack, adding, “And I will tell you, it has done so more than mindful of the Iraq experience. We will not repeat that moment.”

If Kerry harbors any doubts about the evidence, he kept them well hidden. Speaking unhurriedly, and occasionally gesticulating with his arms, he presented the gas attack as a carefully planned assault carried out by chemicals-weapons units of the Syrian army:

We know that the regime was specifically determined to rid the Damascus suburbs of the opposition, and it was frustrated that it hadn’t succeeded in doing so. We know that, for three days before the attack, the Syrian regime’s chemical-weapons personnel were on the ground in the area, making preparations. And we know that the Syrian regime elements were told to prepare for the attack by putting on gas masks and taking precautions associated with chemical weapons.

We know that these were specific instructions.

We know where the rockets were launched from, and at what time. We know where they landed, and when. We know rockets came only from regime-controlled areas and went only to opposition-controlled or contested neighborhoods. And we know, as does the world, that just ninety minutes later all hell broke loose…

One thing Kerry didn’t say was that the U.S. government would wait for the weapons inspectors to complete their work and issue a factual report before raining down bombs on Syrian targets. He all but dismissed the U.N. investigation, saying that it wouldn’t determine who had fired the chemical weapons but merely confirm that they had been used. “By the definition of their own mandate, the U.N. can’t tell us anything that we haven’t shared with you this afternoon or that we don’t already know,” Kerry insisted.

The actual evidence, which is presumably classified, wasn’t published in the report. Also conspicuously lacking was any direct evidence showing that Assad himself, or the people in his immediate circle, ordered the attack. What the document says is that the U.S. has intercepted evidence “that leads us to assess that Syrian chemical weapons personnel—including personnel assessed to be associated with the SSRC”—the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center, an arm of the Ministry of Defense that manages Syria’s chemical-weapons program—“were preparing chemical munitions prior to the attack”:

Syrian chemical weapons personnel were operating in the Damascus suburb of Adra from Sunday, August 18 until early in the morning on Wednesday, August 21 near an area that the regime uses to mix chemical weapons, including sarin. On August 21, a Syrian regime element prepared for a chemical weapons attack in the Damascus area, including through the utilization of gas masks. Our intelligence sources in the Damascus area did not detect any indications in the days prior to the attack that opposition affiliates were planning to use chemical weapons.

But this account raises some questions. Adra is quite a distance from where the attack was launched in Ghouta—about fifteen miles—and it is reportedly home to many Syrian military installations, including training camps and a prison. The report doesn’t provide any evidence of chemical weapons being moved to Ghouta, or specify which units fired them. Nor does it identify the “Syrian regime element,” by rank or name, which, it claims, “prepared for a chemical attack.”

Kerry, once he had made the moral case for striking at Assad’s regime and military forces, moved on to the broader, strategic rationale for U.S. action, which appears to be what is really driving the Administration’s thinking: protecting the credibility of the U.S. government at a time when it faces other acute problems in the Middle East and possible nuclear showdowns with Iran and North Korea. “Our choice today has great consequences,” Kerry said, and he went on:

It is directly related to our credibility, and whether countries still believe the United States when it says something. They are watching to see if Syria can get away with it, because then maybe they, too, can put the world at greater risk…

It is about whether Iran, which itself has been a victim of chemical-weapons attacks, will now feel emboldened, in the absence of action, to obtain nuclear weapons. It is about Hezbollah and North Korea and every other terrorist group or dictator that might ever again contemplate the use of weapons of mass destruction. Will they remember that the Assad regime was stopped from those weapons’ current or future use? Or will they remember that the world stood aside and created impunity?

Not surprisingly, Kerry didn’t dwell on the argument that it was his boss, President Obama, with his loose talk of “red lines” and “game changers,” who brought into question U.S. credibility. Nor did he give any indication of when a U.S. attack on Syria would begin, or what it might consist of. When the President spoke at the White House shortly after Kerry’s presentation, he also avoided committing to any timetables. Instead, he described what is to come as “a limited, narrow act” designed “to make sure that we maintain the norm against the use of chemical weapons.”

Both Obama and Kerry acknowledged the war-weariness of the American public and the widespread skepticism about any military action post-Iraq. But doing nothing in response to the gas attack would send the wrong message to potential aggressors, the President said, and that would constitute “a danger to our national security.” This, though, was Kerry’s moment. From anti-war protestor to public defender of a prospective U.S. bombing raid, he has come a long way. History would, he said, “judge us all extraordinarily harshly if we turned a blind eye to a dictator’s wanton use of weapons of mass destruction.”